St Kilda Consulting 02 - Innocent as Sin

face-to-face until tonight, but yeah, I know a lot about him.”
    “And me.”
    “And you,” Rand agreed. “You can read my dossier if you like.”
    She blinked. “Will it tell me why you wanted to slit Bertone’s throat?”
    “I’d better buff my acting skills. I didn’t think I gave myself away.”
    “Only once, the last time he turned his back on you.”
    Silence filled the car.
    Kayla waited.
    “Yes, I know Bertone well enough to want him dead,” Rand said. “But that makes me one of about a million potential assassins.”
    “Why? Because he’s rich?”
    “Because he’s evil.”
    She drew in a deep breath. “Interesting choice of words.”
    “It’s the twenty-first century,” Rand said calmly, steering the SUV through another steep dip. “People are free to talk about evil rather than bad childhoods, which most people have without turning into murderers. The Siberian started poor, but so do billions of people. They don’t end up like him.”
    “Siberian? Bertone? He’s Russian?”
    Rand nodded.
    “That explains it,” she said.
    “Explains what? No country has a corner on evil. I’ll match some American-grown thugs against Bertone any minute of any hour.”
    “It explains his accent. His English is grammatically perfect, almost without accent, but there is a heaviness to it that you only get in Slavic tongues.”
    “The dossier didn’t mention you were a linguist,” Rand said.
    “I traveled a lot, right after college, after my parents died.”
    “Did you like it?” he asked, because that part of her dossier had been blank except for passport entries, the coming and going of a world traveler.
    “Like it? No. I loved it. I hit every continent except Antarctica. I was looking for a job that would let me save the world. Turns out the world didn’t want to be saved.”
    Rand’s smile was a knife-edge of white. “True fact.”
    “Then gringos became everybody’s favorite target,” she said without bitterness, “so I hung up my backpack and got a job close to home.”
    “Smart. Your experience should make it easier.”
    “Make what easier?” she asked.
    “I’d hate to try and explain this transnational clusterfuck to someone who’d never been farther than Kansas.”
    Rand turned right at the country intersection.
    “Are the hummingbirds actually in my dossier?” Kayla asked after a moment. “My babies, as you called them.”
    He laughed. “St. Kilda is nothing if not thorough. Those kinds of details are how you discover where someone is likely to surface next. Helps to reaquire the target. You love those flying beggars, which means you’ll show up to feed them, at least for the rest of the month you occupy the ranch.”
    “Any other time of the year, I’d let those little flying pigs pollinate cactus, but right now it’s migration time. They count on me to get to Montana. One of my neighbors loves the birds, too. She’s agreed to start feeding them next week. Until then, it’s on my karma.”
    Rand couldn’t help liking Kayla better for caring about something that brought her no obvious return. “What species do you have?”
    “Oh, I’ve got them all right now, broadtails and Anna’s and Costa’s and even some rufous.”
    “The rufous aren’t headed for Montana. They summer by the thousands north of Seattle. In a few weeks they’ll be showing up on my doorstep.”
    “You feed hummers?” she asked.
    “I even paint them. Or try to. They’re as fast as they are fierce.”
    Kayla knew it was crazy, but she trusted Rand more because he shared her love of those flying bits of life.
    Then he killed the headlights and her throat closed.
    Trust was overrated.

27
    Dry Valley
Saturday
8:08 P.M. MST
    W hat are you doing?” Kayla asked tightly.
    “Going in stealth mode.”
    She gave him a disbelieving look. “We’re miles from the ranch.”
    “Light shows a long way in the desert. I’d rather see someone before he sees me.”
    She let out a ragged breath. After a few moments, she got the rhythm of driving in the dark. It helped that the night wasn’t absolutely black. Once her eyes adjusted, the starlight was surprisingly bright, throwing ghostly shadows. The dirt road was a pale ribbon unwinding through the darker plants of the Sonoran Desert.
    The longer she went without artificial light, the more she saw. Features of the landscape became distinct; subtle divisions between rock and plant and shadow became clear.
    “I used to ride at night,” she said